


Yesterday

by LORBEERPRINZ



Series: Tumblr Promts [6]
Category: Marginal Prince (Anime)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, tumblr promt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-04-11 01:18:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4415504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LORBEERPRINZ/pseuds/LORBEERPRINZ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paris seemed like the city of eternity, connecting past and present. Joshua hoped that being here could help him to do the exact same thing, no matter how hopeless it appeared.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> Promt: "What happened doesn't change anything"  
> Oh man, this was supposed to be a drabble, but then I got carried away haha Actually, I also planned to include more of my personal experiences from my short Paris trips, but then the whole thing would have been even longer… In the end, the central topic became time, even though I hadn’t planned it to be - sometimes, works can gain a life on their own, I guess.

Paris was indeed a city like no other, but Joshua was unsure if this was a good or bad thing.  
He loved the beautiful sights it had – old dignified buildings full of history, the greatest pieces of world culture concentrated on a few spots, inhabitants brimming with cosmopolitan life, the finest cuisine on earth. Still, this city was modern, or rather, eternal yet always changing its face together with the world. Hardly anywhere else would one experience a mixture as here.  
On the other hand, however, the amount of people that were everywhere at every time was almost too much for Joshua, who had spent most of his life in isolation from huge crowds. He had experienced a similar uneasiness in Tokyo, but only stayed a quite short time in this city, whereas now, he had been in Paris for almost a week. The noise, the people, the dirt that lay behind the pretty facades; all of it was beginning to suffocate him more and more. Once the magic of this city begins to wear off, it becomes a monster ready to swallow you as long as you’re not used to it.

 But Joshua was here for a reason.  
All during his stay, he tried his best to ignore the signs of Paris’s darker side, the existence of corners his bodyguards would not let him get even close to. Due to the incredible traffic, he actually walked a lot more than he was being driven – a nightmare to his security personnel, but Joshua himself actually appreciated this peculiarity of the city, as it enabled him to get a better look at everything around him. He sincerely appreciated the rich culture that peeked from every corner, found something new to see with each step, even if this meant mixing with the masses of ordinary tourists from all around the globe. Joshua didn’t mind walking among the common folk, nobody knowing of his royal status and he found his bodyguards’ concerns about everything he did a little too exaggerated.

 Maybe he shouldn’t have mentioned to them that he felt watched from time to time.  
Joshua brushed this off as coincidences, maybe he stuck out from a crowd more than he had expected. After all, this wasn’t the same as the collective observance of a lot of people that was normal in big groups and Joshua had never really liked, this was something he could _feel_ , eyes piercing into his back from somewhere.  
He knew this feeling.  
And sometimes, when he would turn around to see if there was really someone looking specifically at him, he thought he had seen a flash of blue across the street or from the other side of the park. But every time he blinked and looked again, the blue was gone.

 

On the fifth day of his travel, Joshua decided to finally visit the Eiffel Tower. There were a lot of interesting buildings already on the way to it, but at the same time, the most common route to one of the world’s most popular sights was lined with people sitting on rugs or the cold concrete trying to sell the same, probably overpriced, souvenirs in broken English to everyone passing them. The prince felt sorry these people, who seemed to have no other chance to survive in this huge and expensive city. And he was also a little angry at himself when he realized he felt annoyed by them after a while.  
Luckily, that did not change the breathtaking impression the Eiffel Tower made on him.  
Standing right under it was surely not the best position to get a good view on it, the one that was on all postcards ever, but it was good to realize the Tower’s actual height.  
It was almost intimidating.

 While staring at the great steel monument, the green-haired once again felt eyes staring at him, this weird tingling behind one ear he would sometimes feel when someone approached him from behind. Until a few months ago, this feeling meant something nice, but this time Joshua believed it was one of the souvenir-sellers trying to wring money out of him.  
He turned around to face that poor person, wanted to compliment them away as politely as possible before his bodyguards would become impatient and do it on their own.

 But once again, there was no one.  
Just a little flash of blue he could make out in the corner of one eye.  
Maybe this feeling had really been the old, pleasurable one.

 

Joshua shook his head and laughed a little about himself. There’s no way he would come to tourist-spot like this, he was a born Parisian after all.

 

 

Later the same day, Joshua went to seek rest in a small café he had found while exploring some more remote (but supposedly safe) corners of the city. He tried to clear his ears from the perpetual drown the constant noise of the city with all its people and cars and honks had resulted in while clinging to a cup of expensive, but very exquisite coffee.  
He reflected on the past days’ flashes of blue some more, was still convinced that this all had been accidents or pranks his mind had played on him. As he watched his fingernails repeatedly hitting the small table, he didn’t even notice how someone sat down in the chair opposite to his.

 

“It’s been a while.”  
Joshua still didn’t look up, it all seemed so natural. Only one person would invade his privacy uninvited, because he was the only person who knew he could.  
“Indeed.”  
He could hear one of his bodyguards clear his throat from a bit away, but the prince silenced him with a short wave of his hand before he could take any action. Sometimes authority could be useful.  
He finally looked up and felt his heart take up a faster pace as he saw these beautiful, golden eyes again. It had been way too long. 

His bright smile was met with a more reserved, but certainly heartfelt one.  
“I’m so glad I finally found you.”  
Henri laughed a little.  
“Right now it rather seems like I found you. You could have just come to our house, though, it’s not hard to find.”  
He was right, of course, finding the residence of the most influential family in the whole city was very easy; actually Joshua knew exactly where it was. This time it was the prince who laughed. “As if they’d let me. And I guess your family would not be really happy about me showing up at your doorstep.”  
“Certainly.”

Joshua sighed deeply. “Henri, listen…”  
The blue-haired raised a finger to silence him, a well-known gesture. In fact, everything he did seemed so familiar, the boy hadn’t changed at all. Joshua was very glad about that. Henri was still the Henri he knew so well and cherished so much.  
“I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk here.” He bobbed his head around a bit, making it clear that he was fully aware of the bodyguards’ presence. He probably also knew they knew who he was and were of the opinion that he shouldn’t be around the one they were trying to protect.  
“But we really need to talk.”  
Joshua’s friend nodded.  
“I know where we can go.”

 

 

It took a bit to convince the bodyguards to leave Joshua off on his own together with Henri, but in the end, the prince counted on his royal authority once more and won. He would call them as soon as they had finished their talk.

 

After an awkwardly silent taxi drive, the two of them arrived in a long street in what Henri explained was the 16th Adornissement of Paris, a place full of mansions hidden behind high fences and lined with security measures. Joshua was actually surprised when his friend did not lead him into one of the imposing houses there, but to one that was rather obviously an apartment complex, looking strangely out of place in this part of the city.  
It turned out, however, that even this complex used to be a huge villa in the past and had at some point been turned into several luxurious apartments, one of which belonged to Henri. And as befitting the boy and his exquisite taste, everything inside of it was of the finest materials, the greatest quality, a mixture of antiquities and modernity. 

“Actually”, Henri finally broke the silence and explained while showing Joshua the way into his private salon, “I’m not here very often. They still rather want me to be at home.”  
Joshua nodded without a word. He had seen the huge villa the Saint Germain family occupied on the way here, it was only a few streets away. It seemed they were giving Henri a false freedom and still bound him to them, just like they had by sending him to St. Alphonso. They would never let him go. 

They sat down on the large leather sofa.  
The high walls were adorned with beautiful paintings, expensive lights and antique furniture, all of them giving the room an almost museum-like atmosphere, now that Joshua knew his friend was hardly ever here.  
It was almost surreal. 

Henri sat down in a big chair made of equally expensive leather, across the small table, but Joshua would rather prefer if Henri had sat next to him. Still, he smiled.  
It had been so long since they had been together the last time. He hadn’t heard of the blue-haired ever since their encounter in Tokyo. They hadn’t even talked about this event, and maybe this was the best opportunity now. There were so many things they had to talk about that Joshua didn’t even really know where to start.  
For the moment, he just wrapped himself into the warmth his own body seemed to emit at the sight of the one he had thought was lost forever. But he knew he could not stay like this for the rest of the day, as much as he would have liked to. 

Once again, it was Henri who dared to speak up. He smiled faintly, but not as much as Joshua would have hoped.  
“I’d offer you this place instead of a hotel, but I there are a lot of people that wouldn’t like to see you here, I suppose.”  
Joshua sighed and nodded as his friend went on.  
“I can understand some of them, though. For you, this is the most dangerous place to be at.”  
The French boy leaned back and seemed to sink into the soft leather of the chair, his smile faded and made way for a sudden bitterness the young prince from Loreto knew all too well. A bitter face that always hurt to see.  
“After all, you’re sitting here with the devil’s child. And it has proven to you to be just that.”

 

There it was.  
The moment, the topic Joshua had feared, had come. He silently begged Henri to let go of it quickly, but he also knew that Henri being Henri, this would not happen. It had never happened in their shared time, despite Joshua’s pleas and his endless efforts to change the boy’s view of himself. Obviously, he had not succeeded at all.  
An endless repetition.

 

“I would really like to stay with you for longer”, Joshua stated wholeheartedly. He smiled.  
The blue-haired looked up again. “You almost died because of me.”  
“No”, the prince replied with a slight shake of his head, trying to keep up his smile, “Nothing of it was your fault and you know that. And besides, what happened doesn’t change anything. You’re still very important to me.”  
He could hear his friend inhale deeply, golden eyes closed, as if he was trying to take in every single word Joshua has said and suck it deep inside his mind and body. After a few silent moments, Henri finally faced Joshua again and his little smile returned to him.  
“Still as naïve as ever, I see. You haven’t changed at all.” 

“Same for you”, Joshua laughed, “you’re the same as always too.”  
He wasn’t sure if he should be happy about that. On the one hand, he was glad that his friend had not taken a turn for the worse, however this would have happened anyway. But on the other hand, Henri hadn’t really improved either, the pressure of his family still weighing heavy, still unable to release himself from their grasp.  
He reached across the table until he touched the French’s pale, slender hand. There was a sudden wish surfacing in him, the wish to take Henri and leave this place with him, somewhere, just the two of them. Joshua didn’t need to stay in Loreto, he was free to go wherever he wanted, with whomever he wanted. He finally had the possibility to get Henri out of his family’s grasp, to protect him from their surveillance and accusations.

 

But at the same time, he knew Henri would never come with him.  
He pressed the other one’s hand. 

“It’s true, I haven’t changed. But that also means that my feelings for you haven’t.”  
Henri looked at the two hands on the armrest. To Joshua’s surprise, he squeezed the one on top of his lightly.  
“I know.”

 

As he got up from his chair, Joshua let go of the French’s hand and watched him slowly walking across the room. The view on his back, his elegant posture in front of the window, reminded Joshua of the times they had had together, the times he secretly wished to return to, or recreate at a different place.  
Henri appeared to look out of the window, but his gaze went into nothingness. Or rather, as Joshua knew, into himself.  
He could hear his friend sigh a little. 

Everything was so familiar.  
They seemed to be frozen in old times and just transplanted here into a time and space that could not keep them.

 

“Even if we haven’t changed, the world around us has. That’s how life goes.”

 

Finally, Henri turned around to face his friend again, took a few steps towards him.  
“We can’t go on like this.”

 

When he was close enough, Joshua pulled the blue-haired into a tight embrace, inhaled the familiar scent of his hair, his body, his everything. This was why he had come to Paris. This was what he had been searching for the last days.  
No, actually, he had been looking, yearning for it ever since they had parted ways. Being unable to just take him along somewhere else was absolutely cruel.  
“No, we can’t.” 

They stayed like this for a few moments, maybe even minutes, Joshua couldn’t tell.  
They only parted again as there came a buzz and light vibration from one of Henri’s pockets. They boy pushed himself away, pulled out his phone and looked at the screen without much of a word. He lingered over it for a bit, then turned his golden eyes back to meet Joshua’s red.

 

“You better go now.”

 

Joshua understood, fleeing from the Saint Germain family was impossible, taking Henri somewhere else was impossible, staying here was impossible. He caught himself wishing they could go back to their time on St. Alphonso and stay there forever, frozen in their happiest days, the most precious memories.  
But of course, this was impossible.

 

The two of them parted in the large doorway, centuries old.

 “You can always come back if you want to turn back the clock for a bit.”  
“Thanks. Maybe I’ll already come tomorrow.”  
“There is no tomorrow for us, _couillon_. Only yesterday.”

 

“Right. Then until this yesterday.”


End file.
